[USAF80]

I'll wait for them to find the aircraft first before I make any assumptions. Boeing is already in hot water over the 787 battery fires. Sometimes in an in-flight emergency you have no time to make radio calls. One of my old commanders who was a pilot told me in an emergency you aviate (fly), navigate, then communicate.

You keep the bird in the air first, then figure out where you are, the last thing you do is let others know your plight.

I had a crippled bird that had an engine explosion on rotation. The flight crew got off a Mayday once and we never talked to them again until the jet was on the runway.

In any aviation accident you have these factors:
-Pilots screwed up
-Maintenance screwed up
-Aircraft screwed up
-Outside forces (hijacking, bomb, lightning, birds, hail, ice, wind shear, volcanic ash, etc)

It is entirely possible they may have had a catastrophic failure that killed all comms. The westward turn would be consistent with them trying to get to land (no one wants a water landing)if the flight deck was dark (no displays) they may not have known where they were and maybe was hoping for visual references.

Aircraft have redundant systems but sometimes the boxes are right next to each other in the electrical bays so a fire or explosion would tend to kill the redundancy feature.

[painter]

Thanks for the reply. Very interesting.